Sunday, January 20, 2013

Recently in a Scala project, I've hit a problem with sparse bit set. Typically, I was moving around set of 30~50 integers between 0 and 2047 with operation such as xor, and, circular shift etc. Basic operations, but repeated extensively, were soon to become a bottleneck in my application. The first implementation used scala BigInt (the main reason was the straightforwards shift call) but it later appeared that other solutions were more suited to the problem.
In this post, I will profile basic operation on 5 implementation alternatives: Scala BigInt, mutable and immutable BitSet versus Java BigInteger and BitSet (Java type can be used inside the Scala application of course).
Source code is available on github